I could not put this book down! It is fascinating. How do daughters turn out like their mothers when they aren't raised by them? This story focuses on the women of two families and the families they made. Human, imperfect, and loved.

Like Mother, Like Mother is about three generations of women. I typically like family sagas but was disappointed with this book. The book is divided into three parts, concentrating on the three women, Lila, Grace and Zelda. Zelda,mother to Lila, died in a mental hospital when Lila was young. Lila valued career more than motherhood and Grace, her daughter, writes a book about her well-known mother. There is also speculation that Zelda did not die in the hospital but instead ran away.

This book did not work for me for several reasons. Lila was an extremely successful publisher. Her story starts when she is forced into retirement at 65. Her story is all over the place. The timeline jumped all around and never seemed to cover a particular time frame completely.

The second part of the book was about Grace. Grace flounders around trying to figure out her life. However, in this part of the story, it also becomes political. Today's political climate was a part of the book. Some names were changed, some were not. It was not difficult to know the author's political views.

The third part of the book was about Zelda and the family investigating what really happened to her. This part of the book was the most interesting to me. I feel we were just given snippets of each women's life. I have read and enjoyed other books by Susan Rieger, but this one was just OK.

My thanks to NetGalley and Dial Press for the opportunity to read an ARC of this novel.

The book’s structure is multigenerational, with three parts that each cover the lives (and deaths) of three of the main characters, with the necessary overlapping in order to show their impact on each other. The style is intriguing, and the writing is brisk and witty. Much is revealed about the characters of each, how they are similar yet in some ways vastly different, and why the title succinctly tells all. Powerhouse journalist Lila Perreira rises from poor working-class Detroit to Jewish high society when she marries Joe, scion of a wealthy automotive industry family, whose mother, Frances, fully accepts the lowly girl from the wrong side of town. Career-obsessed, Lila quickly becomes the editor of an important Washington daily in the wake of the Watergate scandal. This happens during the 199Os, the last gasp of print media’s hold on the news. Watergate reverberates through the Lila-driven expose of President Chick Webb, a felonious type drawn from more contemporary times. At one point I thought that the frenetic, smart, fast-talking Lila was an obvious amalgam of both Woodward and Bernstein and maybe every whistle-blower since. Shortly afterward, this is almost literally confirmed.

I confess the investigative journalism ‘bring ‘em down’ element didn’t enthral me. There’s just too much of it, it’s almost cringingly cliched at points, and the detail and repetition lend themselves to skimming. More interesting, though still occasionally both stereotypical and overwrought, is the impact of Lila’s choice to have children but provide them little in the way of mothering. Having lost her own mother, the beautiful Zelda, in early childhood, she survived her brutish father and his equally unloving mother seemingly by sheer force of will. Her two older daughters, so close in age and looks that they are called ‘the twins,’ have each other and their saintly father and loving maternal grandmother for emotional sustenance. The youngest, Grace, openly referred to as a ‘mistake,’ takes after her sensitive and devoted father and builds an obsessive case against her mother, even taking notes as a young child. She then publishes a ‘scandalous’ (as it is repeatedly called) thinly-disguised ‘tell all’ novel.

The joint legacy of Zelda’s forced committal (by her husband) to the mental asylum in which she died, without ever again seeing her three young children, and Lila’s motherless/loveless childhood, are visited on Grace. But there is a twist. Unlike Lila, who accepted her father and grandmother’s story about Zelda’s early death without ever seeing her grave, Grace is consumed by her belief that this was a pretext. Zelda’s story in the third part is centred on her quest to find out.

There is a huge cast of characters, thankfully listed in a character map. Many of them, like the fictive but familiar president, get too much ink. Of the three main female characters, only Grace, barely 30, is alive when the story begins. But even dead, Lila dominates, which is entirely the point.

The story has plenty of emotional and social resonance, asking ‘big questions’ about motherhood, family, intergenerational trauma, dirty politics and the role of media. The big question for me is why the dauntless Lila, unafraid to tell Joe, on the eve of their marriage, that she didn’t want children, then seemingly just capitulated and had three, one an ‘afterthought.’ The ostensible reason is that Joe and the best domestic help their money could by made it feasible. Lila is nothing if not self-obsessed but she’s too smart not to realize how and why their agreement would affect all concerned. Not to mention that late 20th century women had far more options in terms of pursuing careers and having or not having children than this story suggests. By Lila’s time, working mothers were the majority, and childless marriages were fast becoming so. This was certainly even ‘more true’ among those as privileged as this family. A Lila who could fight tooth and claw a long distance away from her difficult childhood would not have been so passive, and then so indifferent, even ruthless, about the choices in front of her. I wanted to sympathize with Lila, Grace and Joe, who get the shortest end of the stick, while Zelda was the truly tragic victim. But I ended up thinking only that circumstances may shape character but they don’t make it.

This is a complex novel, following the women in one Jewish American family across three generations. It also left me with complex feelings. It’s the sort of book that draws you in and keeps you reading, but the emotionally-repressed characters left me emotionally uninvested.

I didn’t love the opening, but this quickly became an engaging read told with a unique, dialogue-heavy writing style.

Lila’s mother was put into an asylum by her abusive father when she’s just two years old. She grows up without a mother and with a horrible father. Her older brother and sister are scared, but differently.

The very driven Lila sort of lucks out in finding a wonderful husband who is a successful lawyer and is also all right with being the primary caregiver. The two oldest children, just a year apart, deal better than their younger sibling, Grace. As Lila becomes more and more consumed with her wildly successful career as a newspaper editor, she becomes more and more resentful that Lila isn’t the kind of mother Grace wants her to be. Lila was told that her mother died in the asylum in 1968. Grace doesn’t believe it.

This is an interesting story about how family shapes us and, of course, our expectations of mothers.

NetGalley provided an advance copy of this novel, which RELEASES OCTOBER 29, 2024.

From the publisher: An enthralling novel about three generations of strong-willed women, unknowingly shaped by the secrets buried in their family’s past.

Spanning generations, and populated by complex, unforgettable characters, Like Mother, Like Mother is an exhilarating, portrait of family, marriage, ambition, power, the stories we inherit, and the lies we tell to become the people we believe we’re meant to be.

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This one sat on my shelf for a long time and I hesitated to pick it up for some reason, but my sister read it and said it was great so I finally started it. I really enjoyed this with the relationship between Lila and Grace as we explore how their pasts influence their present day lives and each other. The writing is beautiful and the characters are well-drawn and realistic. I would definitely read more by this author.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Available October 29, 2024.

A multigenerational story about three ambitious women starting with Zelda and Lila back in 1960 Detroit. What happens next changes the trajectory of Lila's life forever, shaping the way she raises her own family.

It deals heavily with abandonment, either by a mother or father and the fall out that occurs from it. There is no individual out there who has experienced abandonment as a child and not had it shape whether or not they have children, and if so how they raise them.

The characters were very easy for me to relate to, and I became invested in how Lila and Grace's lives would turn out.

Another stark reminder that family secrets rarely stay secret, especially now that DNA tests and genealogy tracking are as popular as they are today.

There is a section at the beginning titles Cast of Characters, bookmark it because you will want to refer to it. There is a large cast and multiple POVs. This definitely helped me keep everyone straight.

Such a compelling novel not just in terms of the abundant character development, but the amount of culture references that are brought about by Lila's job with newspapers over the years. I really found it fascinating.

The age old question of nature vs nurture and the guilt inducing theory that mothers can have a successful career or a family life is fed throughout this story. Three generations of women from the same family will raise questions and hint at answers. Will their circle complete a link or forge another chain in the family's complicated history?

Lila's mother, Zelda, is committed to a mental health facility when Lila is young. She will have no interactions with her mother and eventually will come to believe she died in the facility. Lila is raised by her father, a man whose anger teaches Lila to be independent. She will use this to rise quickly in the publishing world, becoming the executive editor at the Washington Globe while her three daughters are young, leaving their care to her husband.

Lila's youngest daughter, Grace, feels the same abandonment that Lila felt as a small child. She does not understand why her mother does not have time for her. As an adult, Grace will work as a journalist and write a book on her life as the child of a successful, but absent, parent. She also discovers that Zelda's story was not what they had always been told and that her grandmother is still alive.

Susan Rieger tells the story of this family and their pain with an understanding touch. She writes with her heart, leaving readers at times with a sense of loss and other times tinged with hope for their future. Life is complicated but no one gets out unscathed by the people they love. The pain can be forgiven but can it be forgotten?

I really enjoyed this book! It was both a sweeping family drama and a look at what it means to be a women. I thought the characters were fully drawn, I loved the friendship between Ruth and Grace. And although the mystery was somewhat secondary, it was a thread throughout the novel that made me keep turning the pages.

Lila and her 2 siblings are abandoned by their mother when they were young children. They were left in the care of their abusive father and his mother who tries to give them some stability. They were always told their mother died in a mental institution. Through the years Lila looked for her mother but never found her on her deathbed she left her daughter a letter to find out what happened to her mother. Lila left to go to college and never returned to her childhood home or her father’s abuse. She became the executive director of the Washington Globe and married her college boyfriend but strikes a deal with him that he will raise the children and basically become the mother in the relationship. Whereas becoming like mother like daughter.
Interesting concept for a book but drug on a bit.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

In Like Mother, Like Mother, we learn about esteemed journalist Lila Pereira, her daughter Grace, and her mother, Zelda. It's a novel about inheritance, with each woman carving her own path while resisting the roles of wife and mother. Somehow it succeeds in rendering everyone with warmth and nuance. The family doesn't feel dysfunctional, just complex.

I LOVED the first and last of three sections and would read a book entirely focused on Lila, while the middle section focused mostly on Grace felt like the characters were ..characters. Grace may have had the most page time but I least know who she is, and found myself thinking "this isn't how people speak" at times. I also sometimes had to use the mention of a specific year to orient myself in the timeline as the narrative jumped back to previous points after moving forward.

I got to the end of the book so sad that it was over and would absolutely say I loved it despite thinking it's not a perfect book.

4.5 stars 🌟 This riveting multigenerational family saga follows three generations of ambitious women. Lila, the central figure, comes from a middle-class family with an abusive father and a mother who was institutionalized and died when she was very young. Tough as nails, she excels in college and marries Joe, whose family is wealthy Jewish royalty. Her success in journalism catapults her to DC, where she is a political correspondent and has a meteoric rise to become executive editor at the Washington Globe. Her success at works causes issues with her youngest of three daughters, Grace and, eventually, her husband. Themes of abuse, marriage, womanhood, motherhood, career, and abandonment are present throughout. I loved this book and the rich, superbly crafted characters who are all flawed, the intellectual prose, and the focus on female characters. The search for family is woven throughout the novel - both related by blood and those who are not but become family. This is thought-provoking in many ways, one of which begs the question, do we understand ourselves better by looking at our past or by looking forward? Also, is a woman destined to become like her own mother with her children? Like Mother, Like Mother has been optioned for the screen and I look forward to watching it.
Many thanks to NetGalley, Random House Publishing, and Susan Rieger for an advance reader's copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

I'm between 3 and 3.5 stars for this one. The beginning and end were definitely 5 star worthy but the rest was just meh. Lila's story initially reached out to me because I too was raised in the Detroit area in the 50 & 60s with a messed-up family, but for the most part, I thought the author was telling me things about her characters, with lists of traits, instead of showing me through their own words and actions. I guess the point of the novel is that what we do to our children is passed down from one generation to the next.

Many thanks to the author and publisher for offering me an arc of this novel via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.

This book is split into three parts. While there’s some overlap in sections, the first section primarily follows Lila, the executive editor of a Washington D.C. newspaper and mother of three children. The second section follows her youngest daughter, Grace, through her college and post-graduate years. The third section is about Grace’s quest to find out what really happened to Lila’s mother, Zelda: did Zelda really die in an institution, like Lila and her siblings were told? Was Zelda out there somewhere, and she’d therefore left Lila and her siblings with their abusive father?

I really enjoyed Lila’s section of the book. She’s a bit of an unlikeable protagonist, but—as the characters in the book point out—would we expect and accept her behavior if she were a man instead of a woman? Lila was interesting and dynamic and I couldn’t wait to see what she did next.

The second portion of the book focused on Grace, with detours following her college roommate, Ruth. I found Ruth to be the more interesting of the two characters, and I enjoyed the sections that centered around her. This section seemed to be paced a little more slowly than the rest of the book.

The real highlight of the book for me was part three, which is a continuation of Grace’s life but really focuses on Grace’s investigation into Zelda. I won’t say more, to avoid spoilers, but I was satisfied with the end of the book.

One choice that bothered me was the lack of question marks at the end of many of the characters’ questions. I could understand making a stylistic decision to do this for one character - maybe that was just his or her intonation - but this was throughout the book.

I think this is a book for people (like me!) who enjoy stories about complicated families with characters who are complex and not always likable, but are always interesting.

This dysfunctional family drama, but with humor, opens with the funeral of Lila Pereira, the recently retired editor in chief of a Washington Post-like newspaper. Jumping around in time, part one of the book looks at Lila’s life, from her difficult childhood to adulthood and her somewhat absentee parenting of her three daughters. Part two then shifts to Lila’s youngest daughter, Grace, from childhood through her mom’s death, along with Grace’s college roommate and best friend Ruth. And part three is mostly Grace following her mom’s posthumous wish that she investigate whether Lila’s mom Zelda actually died in an asylum as Lila’s abusive dad told her, or whether she somehow ran away as Grace posited in her own semi-biographical novel.

There’s a lot going on in this one - lots of characters, lots of plot strands, lots of time covered - and it did take me a little while to get into it. But once I did, I loved it. The offbeat humor and mostly unlikeable characters reminded me somewhat of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer or the books of Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

All that being said, my 4 star rating of this one, while it reflects my reading experience, comes with a big asterisk. This book isn’t out yet, but there’s already some controversy about its attribution of quotes or lack thereof, and I don’t know what to think about it. My e-ARC had an acknowledgements section that did not mention any of this, but the author herself posted on social media this week an additional page which will be in the acknowledgements which states, in part, “I would also like to acknowledge the sources of several unattributed conversations I buried in conversations. They may not be exact.” Followed by a fairly long list. And then she posted to social media one she left off and one she named the wrong person! And I just don’t know what to make of this. Is the zippy dialogue actually mostly quotes? And if so why didn’t she at least identify the actual quotes with their originators?

In LIKE MOTHER, LIKE MOTHER, Susan Reiner takes on the complex, lush, contradictory subject of motherhood. Centering on the life of Lila, a stupendously successful woman who was daughter to a woman institutionalized by her father and is now mother to her own three daughters, the story opens after Lila has died, zooming back to her amazing career during which she appeared to have it all and yet gave so little to her girls and long-suffering husband Doug. I loved the wit, the smart prose, the dialogue, the twists and turns of the plot, the way Reiger never shrank from exploring issues of family, relationships, work, identities, the all of the rich and confusing aspects of contemporary life. The prose was beautiful, the story so well-wrought I felt like I knew the individual characters in this well-peopled story, had a stake in how things went for them. For myself, I am going to recommend this book for my book club -- so much rich subject matter to delve into and discuss! I received a copy of this book and these opinions are my own, unbiased thoughts.

A riveting family saga of three generations of mothers, with a mystery at it’s heart.

Synopsis:
Detroit, 1960. Lila Pereira is two years old when her angry, abusive father has her mother committed to an asylum. Lila never sees her mother again. Three decades later, having mustered everything she has—brains, charm, talent, blond hair—Lila rises to the pinnacle of American media as the powerful, brilliant executive editor of The Washington Globe. Lila unapologetically prioritizes her career, leaving the rearing of her daughters to her generous husband, Joe. He doesn’t mind—until he does.
Spanning generations, and populated by complex, unforgettable characters, Like Mother, Like Mother is an exhilarating, portrait of family, marriage, ambition, power, the stories we inherit, and the lies we tell to become the people we believe we’re meant to be.

My thoughts:
I read and listened to Like Mother, Like Mother, and absolutely loved it! There were so many wonderful quotes from the book, witty dialog, and memorable life lessons. Sadly (or not), I was too busy enjoying the language and the writing to highlight any of them to share here. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

Put this one on your TBR!

Thank you Netgalley and dial press for the advanced reader copy.

I was thankful for the character glossary at the beginning as there are many here to follow but they are introduced in ways that make sense and make it easier to remember them.

With themes of abandonment, found family, motherhood, gender roles, achievement and more, Like Mother, Like Mother takes on a lot. I found this book thoughtful and thought provoking. I enjoyed that most of the characters weren’t totally likeable. I am unsure if I have completely decided if Ruth’s decisions near the end of the story made sense or confused matters slightly. This book was a great fit for this reader who enjoys literary fiction and also a little bit of mystery. I think this would make a great book club choice.

Thank you to @netgalley and @thedialpress for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinions. Like Mother, Like Mother publishes October 29, 2024.

A multi-generational story of mothers…and what kind of mothers women are and what kind we want.

Grace is one of the daughter’s of Lila the executive editor of The Washington Globe. Lila was never the kind of mother she wanted, but Lila’s mother left when she was young she didnt have a good example. After Lila dies, Grace starts digging into family stories.

This story is multiple timelines and miltiple points of view, but not hard to follow. I think this is a must read.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Random House | The Dial Press for an ARC. #LikeMotherLikeMother #NetGalley

This novel was very intense. Some of the dialogue especially in the beginning of the book felt like a heart attack. The dialogue is very brutal and matter-of-fact. I wish I would've enjoyed this novel more, but the storyline was very involved and overwritten. I like reading about dysfunctional families and childhood trauma, but something about the overall novel left me feeling cold. I did not have a good time reading this, but I think the story was important to tell. Decent novel but not for the faint of heart.

"Like Mother, Like Mother" was a very well-written, character-driven novel by Susan Rieger (and the first book of hers that I have had the pleasure of reading). The characters, especially the female characters, were immediately compelling. This is a book that is carried by three very strong women and, as the synopsis implies, lots of heartbreak and tragedy - beginning with Lila's mother who, under the hand of a positively evil, heavy-handed husband and father, Aldo, was institutionalized when Lila was just a child. That generation of the family goes through repeated traumas and tragedies but Lila, an incredibly layered and resilient character, perseveres and becomes the executive editor of a major Washington newspaper and a legend as a female newswoman. She also becomes a mother to three daughters. Lila is not, admittedly, a "natural" not did she really even want to become a mother, but it is arranged in advance that the father will be the primary caretaker. Because of her deferment of childcare, etc. to her really kind husband, he eventually grows intolerant of her time away and they separate (more in name than in legalities) and Grace, in particular, grows up resentful of her mother. These dynamics weave through three generations of women and include a cast of really great characters (Rieger introduces the novel with a literal cast of characters which further enhances the sprawling nature of the book and the roles we all play, in real life, in the lives of other people beyond our own families). But, in this book, the family is where things become stranger than fiction and need to be investigated after Grace pens a a novel based on a very familiar cast of family characters and goes in search of the grandmother she believes may still be alive. Thanks so much to #netgalley and #penguinrandomhouse for the opportunity to read this in advance of its publication on Tuesday 10/29. This is a truly fun, intelligent, and well-written book. I absolutely recommend it!